Student-Led Project Banks on Promise of Fecal Transplants

Stored in a freezer at MIT, fecal material that has been screened and prepared by OpenBiome, a new not-for-profit, is ready to be shipped to a hospital.

By David Glenn

When Carolyn Edelstein’s friends and family gathered for
Thanksgiving in 2012, the conversation kept turning to feces.

Ms. Edelstein, a graduate student at Princeton University’s
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, had
recently seen a close friend suffer through an infection with
Clostridium difficile, a bacterium that can cause severe
and sometimes fatal diarrhea. After several rounds of antibiotics
failed, her friend finally turned to an